This session will draw on the expertise of both community development and immigration clinicians in exploring how to mitigate the impact of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), a new federal law requiring the disclosure of personal information of immigrant business owners. Under the CTA, many businesses will be required to share personal information of the business’ primary owners (and copies of their IDs in the form of a passport, driver’s license, or similar). However, unlike other laws that limit the sharing of personal information amongst federal agencies, information shared under the CTA will be freely accessible to various federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security.
This session will explore the requirements for small businesses under the CTA, ways in which any information disclosed under the CTA could be used by federal authorities, and the different practices that the presenters have explored in their clinics with respect to immigrant entrepreneurship pre- and post-CTA. We hope to bring our clients’ and students’ stories and reactions to the CTA, how we might shift our practices in transactional clinics based on lessons learned from immigration clinics, and how transactional and immigration clinics may be able to collaborate on cases. We intend to break out into small groups to allow participants to share their own practices and collaborate on strategy going forward.